


Purple

by DaLaRi



Series: Rough-edge and His Squad and the Long, Long War [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Ficlet, Gen, Grief, Happy Memories, Nonbinary Character, POV Second Person, Rough's Squad, Shitty Formatting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-17
Updated: 2016-11-17
Packaged: 2018-08-31 12:23:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8578393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaLaRi/pseuds/DaLaRi
Summary: There /are/ happy memories. There were flowers at the edge of a battlefield, and Rough sees, at the end of everything, that Flor remembered.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This piece can be read without reading the earlier bit in the series, but it makes a lot more sense if you've read the first part
> 
> Mando'a vocab  
> vod'ika- little sibling (has the specificity of "little brother" but absent the gendered connotations)  
> beskar'gam- traditional Mandalorian armor, linked to family and heritage and tradition
> 
> tw- grief, mildly disturbing medical descriptions

  * there are flowers at the edge of the field at the end of a ground conflict. you don’t like being there out in the open with the churned earth and the shapes of medics muffled by fog. you can hear cannons booming somewhere in the distance.
  * but the flower. it’s a pale, soft shade of purple you haven’t ever seen outside of holos before, and with the way holos skew blue, the vibrancy of the petals captures you, and you strip your glove off with your teeth. the atmosphere is mildly corrosive, but you barely notice as you move the small petals. the small pollinating animals have fled into their warrens in the hills, but you can still remember them, wooly spined lizards with crowning tufts of fur in _this color_ at the edge of each spike. you wonder where they are now, hope they’re ok. the petal is soft, and you linger for another minute until one of your squadmates registers the breach in your suit. you get a smack upside the head for that one, and accidentally crush the petals between your fingers. Flor looks at your hands, winces, and plops down next to you.
  * “sorry little brother,” they say. “it’s okay,” you say quietly. you wipe your fingers on the fabric at the crook of your knee, and try not to think about the mild cough you have for the rest of the day. one of the med officers checks out the tiny lesions on your hand and gives you an antibacterial and a coverage bandage. you don’t mind. you think about the flower all day.
  * after the horrible battle, when your eyes are scanning over the slivers of patterns in the shadows of your greaves, on the patternings of your back-plates’ seams, you see spots of purple and want to weep. Flor remembered even the grey-green color of the stems, and while they always wrote words instead of drawings like your other squadmates did, every time you see that purple and grey-green the word is always _vod’ika_. you want to swear at the sky, at the force, at the whole damned Republic. Flor was younger than you by sixteen seconds, and you miss them with a pain that seems to have no start or end, suspended like disembodied lightning as it arcs through you. you were responsible for Flor’s name, for teasing them relentlessly on misspelling _floor_ on their report on your living conditions. Flor found out that it could also be short for “floral” and co-opted it from under your nose. the memory slips under your guard like a bolt to the chest, and you bloody your fingertips with how tight you hold on to that piece of beskar’gam, sobbing lowly in the dark.



**Author's Note:**

> the light purple and grey-green are references to a pair of characters in another fandom of mine, a particular ship. first person who guesses right will get a cookie. message me at autisticthatthouknowestthine! (askbox is /now/ open haha)
> 
> thanks for reading and i love you all!


End file.
